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Gvim redraw issues in Ubuntu guest inside vmware

Stock gvim 7.4 in Ubuntu 16.04(Xenial) running on VMWare 12.5.0 player with Windows 10 host.
Paging up/down (ctrl-b,ctrl-f) is very slow and I ran the test provided in this ubuntu bug report. It's indicated an 100x slow down.

Does anyone know the cause and a fix/workaround for this? Thanks in advance.

dkwho@mumble:~$ time vim -u NONE -U NONE -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README

real    0m2.706s
user    0m0.624s
sys 0m1.196s
dkwho@mumble:~$ time gvim -u NONE -U NONE -f -S test-redraw-speed.vim /etc/init.d/README

real    23m4.198s
user    0m32.328s
sys 0m5.904s

Display driver information.

dkwho@mumble:~$ sudo lshw -c video
  *-display        
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: SVGA II Adapter
       vendor: VMware
       physical id: f
       bus info: pci@0000:00:0f.0
       version: 00
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=vmwgfx latency=64
       resources: irq:16 ioport:1070(size=16) memory:e8000000-efffffff memory:fe000000-fe7fffff memory:c0200000-c0207fff
Solution

  • I removed my existing vim-gtk and installed vim-gtk3 on Xenial and now it's almost as fast as terminal vim. 

    sudo apt remove vim-gtk
sudo apt install vim-gtk3